Afghanistan war diary: The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment rides through history

SANGIN, Afghanistan  The motto “get some!” is a battle cry favored by all Marines. Depending on its application, the phrase can mean many different things: think notches on the belt on one end of the spectrum, or the New Testament on the other. In Sangin, for instance, Marines who visit the Get Some Chapel at Forward Operating Base Jackson get religion, in one of Afghanistan’s deadliest areas for NATO coalition troops.

In its most elemental form, fighting men roar “get some!” during combat to stir their bloodlust for the enemy. It’s been around since the Vietnam War, but I wonder if the phrase harkens to the days when combat was more brutally intimate, when warriors and soldiers and Indian braves might take a scalp or some other memento of military conquest home with them. In the era of long-range missile strikes and the Geneva Conventions, most Marines seem satisfied to fly out of Afghanistan with a mujahideen-designed welcome mat woven with images of AK-47s. But they still love to “get some.”

When I heard that the saying is the official motto of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment out of Camp Pendleton, I wondered if that meant these were Marines’ Marines, the baddest and bravest infantrymen of them all? Lt. Col. Jason Morris, the battalion commander, disabused me of that idea during a chat at the forward operating base he calls home in southwestern Afghanistan. “No, we are just another infantry battalion. But for whatever reason, it became our little motto,” he said. “The Marines really like that. It is a motivational chant, if you will, before the Marines go into combat. They go ‘get some’ with the enemy.

“That’s what these guys live for,” he said.

The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment has a long history that includes some of the most legendary battles the Marine Corps has ever fought, from Belleau Wood in World War I to Guadalcanal in World War II and Hue City in Vietnam. Morris’ personal history with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment began several years before he took command of the battalion in September 2009 and then led his men into combat this fall in Sangin, Afghanistan. Morris was serving on the 1st Marine Division staff during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 when the executive officer, or second in command, of the 3/5 was killed about a week into the action. Morris took over the position and advanced with the battalion onto Baghdad.

He moved on to other jobs, but the 3/5 Battalion deployed three more times to Iraq. The most famous battle in its recent history was the second onslaught of Fallujah in November 2004, when the Marines fought house to house in intense close quarters combat against jihadi insurgents, pretty much leveling the Iraqi city in the process.

During the Iraq War years, the battalion dropped its title as the “consummate professionals” and reassumed its identity as the “Darkhorse” battalion. Morris tells me the new name was the battalion’s call sign during the Korean War. The 3/5 Marines were heavily outnumbered and surrounded by Chinese troops at the Chosin reservoir, but they fought for 10 days and made it to the sea. Their call sign became “Darkhorse” because it took one to break out of that fight, according to battalion history.

Their stance as a hard-charging infantry unit is manifested in that symbol – the Darkhorse. Everyone in the battalion gets a kick out of it, because “it sounds badass,” Morris said. “The Marines would never give that up at this point. They love being a part of the Darkhorse.”

And now they are making history again during the battalion’s first deployment to Afghanistan. Sangin was called the “Fallujah of Afghanistan” before the 3/5 Marines deployed here. The comparison doesn’t signify much except a place of heavy combat in an urban labyrinth of narrow streets (though Sangin has its green zone of orchards and fields as well).

There is the sense in some military circles that the 3/5 is fated to pull the toughest fights. Whether it was the luck of the draw or a commander’s nod to the fierce battle history of this unit is hard to say. The individual members of the battalion are constantly changing, but the history of the unit stretching back long before many of the current members were born has worked its way into the battalion DNA. “It’s got a long and distinguished legacy,” Morris said. “Every Marine really carries with him the pride in the organization.”

Morris meant that literally: the battle flag propped in the corner of his forward operating base office is weighted with streamers from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment’s many campaigns. When the battalion returns from Sangin, the Darkhorse Marines will have the weight of history and another streamer to add to its heavily laden tip.